Character

Sweet Bites for June 13, 2025

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Morality.

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

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💭 5 Mini Thoughts

Character requires opposition

“The very name of virtue presupposes difficulty and contention and cannot be experienced without an opponent.”

Michel de Montaigne

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Character is who we are

“Character is what we do when we think no one is looking."

H. Jackson Brown

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Character formation takes time

“Character change is real, fortunately, but it is also very slow. These are our moral habits, and as we know from other areas of life (such as eating, exercising, and checking our phone), habits can be very hard to change. Slow, gradual progress is all we should reasonably expect, over the course of months or even years.”

Christian B. Miller

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Character = trust

“Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.”

Alfred Adler

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Character models

“Choose therefore a Cato; or, if Cato seems too severe a model, choose some Laelius, a gentler spirit. Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern. For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.”

Seneca

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

📰 Article Worthy of a Read

The self is moral: We tend to think that our memories determine our identity, but it’s moral character that really makes us who we are by Nina Strohminger

Using the Ship of Theseus as an anchoring point, Strohminger seeks to demonstrate that while we often use memory to record our identity, it is in fact our moral character that forms our individual identity.

📖 Book to Continue Weekly Theme

The Character Gap by Christian B. Miller

“Virtues are acquired habits, which means that we don't have them to start with, and they will take time to cultivate. Repetition and practice are important, just as they are with becoming a chess master or NFL quarterback or champion diver.”

🎥 What Moral Character Isn’t

In the below video, Brandon Warmke explains grandstanding and how it is not what moral character is made of, even though many today attempt to

You can also check out his book Grandstanding.

A few quotes from the book:

“grandstanding is successful to the extent your audience already shares your moral beliefs and values. The more different they are from you, the less likely it is that you will impress them.”

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“If people seek out anger to reinforce their images of themselves as moral paragons, they probably express outrage to get others to see them as moral paragons, too.”

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“Moral talk is our primary means of bringing morality to bear on practical problems. We solve, or at least attempt to solve, many important problems using this resource… We abuse the common resource of moral talk when we moralize excessively, make plainly false or absurd moral claims, or use moral talk in nakedly self-serving ways. These are all things that happen when people engage in moral grandstanding… they result in a degradation of the social currency of moral talk.”

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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